The invention disclosed herein relates to cooperative computing environments and information retrieval and management methods and systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods and systems for capturing and generating useful information about a user's access and use of data on a computer system, such as in the form of documents stored on remote servers, and making such useful information available to others.
Most organizations that have grown past a few hundred employees have some form of directory and usually have made some attempt to augment this directory with personal profile attributes such as memberships, position title or project affiliations. Many have attempted to expand each person's profile by adding skills inventory, educational background or professional accomplishments. Many of these efforts have been successful, but most have not fulfilled their promise. The effort required to update and maintain such a profile and the subjective nature of self description leads to inaccuracies or stale data.
Most such “people finder” systems fail due to the lack of timely updates to the expert's profiles. In addition, many knowledgeable workers do not consider their experience to be valuable to others and may overlook this when manually completing profile forms. The result is that most manually built expertise locator systems are irrelevant or become outdated and eventually fail.
There is therefore a need for a system for automatically and dynamically identifying people as having affinity to or being experts in various topics or content and making this information known to others.